61–70 of 268 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which ones would you want?
I’m seeing a pattern in the lack of detail ;)
Not to thread-jack, but are there any worthy open-sourced competitors to Ableton? I'm just getting into DAWs and was thinking of buying Ableton Live but haven't had the time to explore/compare other options. My musician buddies all tell me not to waste my time and just buy it.
- LMMS[1]: The go-to cross-platform FOSS DAW solution, with VST support and a healthy community.
- Ardour[2]: Much like LLMS, it's a classic Open Source project that runs cross-platform and is quite fully-featured.
- VCVRack[3]: A brilliant FOSS EuroRack Simulator. It has a built-in package manager with an enormous selection of officially supported and community submitted plugins, complete with VST and Linux support.
- Waveform Free[4]: By Tracktion, Waveform is a robust DAW with VST sandboxing and great built-in FX.
- Audio Tool[5]: A great web-based DAW, featuring online collaboration. Last I checked, there was no VST support.
- Bandlab[6]: Another web-based DAW by the folks behind Cakewalk. While it lacks VST support, it offers online collaboration and straight-forward defaults.
If you like scripting, Reaper[7] offers a personal license for $60 and supports Lua, Python, EEL2/JSFX, and it's own ReaScript[8]. Reaper offers a highly customizable, robust solution for power-users. While the above projects are some of the more complete projects, there are many more scattered around Github. If you're interested in the more niche/experimental ones, let me know and I'll reply with my more comprehensive list.
That being said, I've been an Ableton Live user for over a decade and I recommend it for anyone who wants to invest into a more serious music project. These days, I tend to reach for Studio One[9] by Presonus for more involved projects. While it lacks the focus on live performance, it is more feature-complete DAW than Ableton. Studio One doesn't have the same friction-less workflow that Ableton is famous for, but it's an absolute powerhouse when mastered. It's very well funded and one of the youngest, so Presonus had the opportunity to adopt the best features of more dated solutions like Cubase, Logic, Pro-Tools, and Ableton, while stripping away a lot of the bloat.
[1] https://lmms.io/ [2] https://ardour.org/ [3] https://vcvrack.com/ [4] https://www.tracktion.com/products/waveform-free [5] https://www.audiotool.com [6] https://www.bandlab.com/ [7] https://www.reaper.fm [8] https://www.reaper.fm/sdk/reascript/reascript.php [9] https://www.presonus.com/products/studio-one/
As a UI and UX nerd, one thing I really love about the digital music production scene is that software companies writing DAWs and VSTs know their audience and strive to give power users all the tools they need to be as productive as possible. Knobs, curves, programming (Max for Live), integration with external tools. In other fields of software development instead we dumb everything down to the lowest denominator, an…
FruityLoops! But yes, I agree with all of this.
It seems like they say nothing whether they optimised their audio engine. There are a couple of low hanging fruits that they avoid to pick for some reason that would vastly improve the performance. For example they could enable wrapping the VST plugins in their own separate processes. That means the operating system scheduler would be able to distribute the load on available cores in a more efficient way than Ableton…
This isn't an optimization. https://ardour.org/plugins-in-process.html
And also, the kernel cannot schedule more efficiently than Ableton does, because it doesn't know the data dependencies between plugins.
As a UI and UX nerd, one thing I really love about the digital music production scene is that software companies writing DAWs and VSTs know their audience and strive to give power users all the tools they need to be as productive as possible. Knobs, curves, programming (Max for Live), integration with external tools. In other fields of software development instead we dumb everything down to the lowest denominator, an…
FruityLoops! But yes, I agree with all of this.
Not to thread-jack, but are there any worthy open-sourced competitors to Ableton? I'm just getting into DAWs and was thinking of buying Ableton Live but haven't had the time to explore/compare other options. My musician buddies all tell me not to waste my time and just buy it.
The free software DAW is ardour. https://www.ardour.org/ Unfa has made some youtube videos about (and with) it. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAYKj_peyESIMDp5LtHlH2A It does not offer the same possibilities of workflow though, as far as I can see.
Ardour is modelled on "traditional" "linear" DAWs, rather than the live "play this thing when i hit this" flow that Live has enabled so wonderfully. Not sure you'd want to use Live for large scale multi-tracking, movie post-production. Both will work for smaller scale "traditional" record-edit-mix workflows.
As a UI and UX nerd, one thing I really love about the digital music production scene is that software companies writing DAWs and VSTs know their audience and strive to give power users all the tools they need to be as productive as possible. Knobs, curves, programming (Max for Live), integration with external tools. In other fields of software development instead we dumb everything down to the lowest denominator, an…
> Imagine what Ableton would look like if they were only optimising for the user that wants to put a couple of pre-made loops together and call it a song. It would look a lot like FL Studio, which caters more towards that end of the market.
I'd say the opposite: Ableton is more focused and simpler, streamlining lots of stuff (live VSTs) without being less powerful. Kinda Apple-ish in a way.
Not to thread-jack, but are there any worthy open-sourced competitors to Ableton? I'm just getting into DAWs and was thinking of buying Ableton Live but haven't had the time to explore/compare other options. My musician buddies all tell me not to waste my time and just buy it.
Heeey, glad you asked! I'm not full-time on this, but I'm trying to build an OSS DAW. Here is a first tiny demo: https://timdaub.github.io/wasm-synth/ I also wrote about it: https://timdaub.github.io/2020/02/19/wasm-synth/
Not to thread-jack, but are there any worthy open-sourced competitors to Ableton? I'm just getting into DAWs and was thinking of buying Ableton Live but haven't had the time to explore/compare other options. My musician buddies all tell me not to waste my time and just buy it.
Heeey, glad you asked! I'm not full-time on this, but I'm trying to build an OSS DAW. Here is a first tiny demo: https://timdaub.github.io/wasm-synth/ I also wrote about it: https://timdaub.github.io/2020/02/19/wasm-synth/
It seems like they say nothing whether they optimised their audio engine. There are a couple of low hanging fruits that they avoid to pick for some reason that would vastly improve the performance. For example they could enable wrapping the VST plugins in their own separate processes. That means the operating system scheduler would be able to distribute the load on available cores in a more efficient way than Ableton…
> wrapping the VST plugins in their own separate processes. This isn't an optimization. https://ardour.org/plugins-in-process.html And also, the kernel cannot schedule more efficiently than Ableton does, because it doesn't know the data dependencies between plugins.
> Live uses one thread to process a signal path. A signal path is a single chain of audio flow. In tracks where instrument or effect racks are used, with multiple chains in parallel, Live may use one thread per chain depending on how CPU-intensive each chain may be. If two tracks are "chained" by routings, for instance by a side-chain routing, a track being fed to a return track or any tracks being fed into each-other, they are considered dependent tracks and count as one signal path. Any dependant set of tracks will use one thread each.
https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/209067649-Multi-c...
The way they allocate plugins to threads is very inefficient and wrapping each plugin in a separate process sidesteps it as the OS takes over the allocation to different cores.